Page 259 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building
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SUSTAINABLE BROKERAGE 237
Some years back, Martin Melaver and other colleagues at Melaver, Inc. tried to
make the case to our brokerage group that the conventional ways of doing real estate
were simply indefensible: Land was (and continues to be) swallowed up for develop-
ment at unprecedented rates, causing ever-greater sprawl and longer commutes (more
time on the road and less time with family), and adding to ever-greater concentra-
tions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Water resources, even in the fortunate
area of Savannah (which draws upon the large Upper Floridan aquifer), were being
tapped beyond carrying capacity and were being compromised by saltwater intrusion.
Buildings were obscenely inefficient in their use of energy. And so on. The argument,
logically speaking, is compelling: doing real estate in conventional ways is simply un-
tenable. But so, too, was this re-framing. To whom would brokers pitch these ideas?
And why would anyone want to listen? What could we gain by pitching an idea that
was a fundamental critique of what our potential clients practiced? Customers or
clients may not always be right, but telling them point blank that everything they did
was idiotic and made no sense was hardly going to help us drum up business. Ideology
does not sell real estate. We were getting nowhere.
Re-framing would require, instead, contextualizing the issue in terms of market
forces as well as personalizing it. For years, our colleagues doing development work
at Melaver, Inc. were telling us waves of LEED product were coming. All we could
see, at least initially, were the early pilot buildings our own company was con-
structing. And, as the biblical saying goes, you can’t be a prophet in your own home-
town. But then things began to change. Grubb & Ellis, one of the largest real estate
firms in the world, approached Scott Doksansky, who heads up asset management
for Melaver, Inc., to run a day-long seminar on sustainable management practices
for brokers and property managers across the country. That got our attention. So too
did an SIOR (Society of Industrial and Office Realtors) conference where the key-
note speaker focused on green practices as the new standard by which all real estate
would be conducted. Seeing other familiar and very middle-of-the-road trade organ-
izations—NAIOP (National Association of Industrial and Office Properties) and
ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centers) and BOMA (Building Owners
and Managers Association) and ULI (Urban Land Institute)—devote conferences
and articles to green building practices also made a profound impact. Attending
USGBC Greenbuild conferences in 2006 (in Denver) and 2007 (in Chicago), with
20,000-plus attendees and an extensive exhibit hall, seemed worlds away from the
almost quaint first Greenbuild conference in Austin (in 2002), which attracted only
3,000 conferees.
We were beginning to get the message. It really hit home when a large, publicly
traded industrial real estate investment trust (REIT), AMB Properties, announced it
was building 3.3 million square feet of warehousing to LEED standards in our home
market. And our main brokerage competition in town had gotten the nod to do the
leasing for this development. It was time to recognize not only that market conditions
were changing fast, but also that our brokerage division had two choices: play a lead
role in promoting LEED development in our area or lag behind as others took charge.